Need help identifying these heads...

[Pyr0]

Hello guys

I have seen this picture on a forum, (the chinese style heads, shields and halberds) and I hope some of you might be able to help me identify the metal bits manufacturers's.  The plastic bodies are from GW bretonian men at arms.

Thanks

[Svennn]

Interesting!  Not a clue as to your question I'm afraid but I would like to know the answer too.

If they were sculpted for this purpose it seems a great shame they did not do proper and more appropriate bodies also. If they are already available anywhere I certainly have not come across them and I have an awful lot of Chinese miniatures.

[Dolmot]

My wild guess is Amazon Miniatures. They had an impressive range of heads, weapons, shields and other bits. I ordered a bunch of this-and-that back then. A lot of that obviously remains in the bits box untouched, but that's fine because the company has apparently closed so no chance of replenishing any time soon. There's some discussion of its fate elsewhere.

They had Qin heads, Chinese heads, Mongol heads and much more. If it helps at all, pdf catalogues can still be downloaded from archive.org. Of course, those replicate their website images which were a baffling mix of passable photos, line drawings, blurry 5x5 pixel scans of shiny tin, and nonexistent. Maybe I shouldn't blame them. It was a small business with thousands of tiny bits from multiple sources (including, for example, Garrison miniatures which allegedly date back to 1966).

Their site also contained a lovely list of weapons. Always good to know that Shi Ba Ban Wu Yi is the skill in wielding Shi Ba Ban Bing Qi, which comprises Dao, Qiang, Jian, Ji, Gun, Bang, Shuo, Tang, Fu, Yue, Chan, Pa, Bian, Jian, Chui, Cha, Ge and Mao. Maybe I should download personal copies of everything, just in case...

(Is that a Ji in the pic?)

[Svennn]

They are far chunkier than any of the Amazon Chinese I have but I do not have any of the separate heads so still could be.

[Bosch]

QT, if I remember correctly. All of their ranges had seperate interchangeable heads. They used to be everywhere but I haven't seen them for years.

[HerbyF]

I see three different periods in Chinese history in those heads.

[Dolmot]

I see a banner from Warhammer, where ancient units are happily mixed with crusades, gunpowder and steam helicopters... (Let's not even go into the "dragons and magic" argument.)

QT was sold by Amazon, maybe others too. Some of the ranges listed by Amazon were tiny, others bobble-headed, some quite nice. It's completely plausible that any individual range you bought from them appeared entirely different from the next one.